


My Brother's Keeper

by Aansero



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Forced Prostitution, Insanity, M/M, POV First Person, Rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 07:39:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13993629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aansero/pseuds/Aansero
Summary: In Kekropia, Mildmay is given a choice: starve to death, or whore out his crazy, skew-eyed, scared as fuck hocus brother.He chooses not to starve.





	My Brother's Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> With all my thanks to Pneumatic as beta, and Airo for the title <3
> 
> Concrit is most welcome!

_Mildmay_

So here's the thing, and I don't know whether it makes a flying fuck's worth of difference, but I wanted to say it upfront anyway: it wasn't my idea.

Maybe even thinking that – that along of it not being my idea I'm a kind of better person than if it had been – makes me just as bad, given that I still let it happen. Worse – I helped it happen. I don't know. I don't like thinking about it. Any of it. If memories were stones I'd take this one and throw it into the Sim, hard as I could, and spit after it for good measure. For the symbolism, mind you, spit's probably nicer than the water of the Sim. But I can't, no matter how much I wish I could, and I hate that almost as much as I hate myself for what I did, and didn't, do, on those fucking endless Kekropian grasslands.

What you also need to know, apart from that, is it ain't like we were just hungry neither, because we weren't. We were starving. There's a difference, trust me, and we were a septad foot across the line right into starving. There weren't even no more of them grains, and the only plants were grass and Felix, in one of his rare topside moments, told me you can't eat grass. I tried anyway – a few tough, short leaves, then handfuls of it roots and all, because when you're starving you do that kind of thing. I spent two days of it, wondering if I should try force Felix to eat the fucking grass, and whether I'd have better luck with that when he was topside, when I could try reason with him, or when he was down the well, when I could bully him. But before I could make myself decide, we found the farm.

Or, I guess I should say, the farm found us. The farmers did, anyway. We were just trudging along, Felix beside me for once, heads down because there was a bitch of a wind blowing in our faces, when I heard something behind us. Two men on horses riding up our asses, and they were big men too, and their horses were like the horses in Mélusine in the same way bear baiting dogs were like ratting dogs. Which was to say, they were fucking huge. Bulging muscles, hooves bigger than my head – but not as big as the shit I knew we were in, once I saw the expressions on the men's faces.

One of the men, whose face was wrinkled and brown like cheap leather, spurred his horse on like he was just going to run us down. And there I was, dragging on Felix's arm because he'd frozen stiff, and I was shouting at him to move when instead he went all limp and collapsed to his knees, and maybe I kicked him though I ain't sure because like I said, there was a fucking giant horse about to trample us both to smears in the grass.

The man served aside last second, and I took one good look at Felix's face, pasty white and blotchy like a drowned pig, and how he was shaking like and clutching at my leg hard enough to bruise, and I admit now it was probably the worst thing to do, but I lost my temper. I don't even remember what the fuck I shouted, only I shouted, and I swore a lot and you could tell these country folk ain't ever heard of swearing like we do it in Mélusine's Lower City. It felt good, for about two septad seconds.

The second man came up, sneering down at us from his horse. 'Get off our land,' he said, and unfurled his whip.

Felix, still clinging to my leg, made a sound like someone just stood on a half-dead dog and crushed it the other half way. Then he went all still and hard, and his whole body seized up, so tight I thought if I tried breaking his grip now I'd snap all his fingers. But sound of him had killed my temper deader than a pig hung up in a butcher's window, leaving just a sick feeling of fear and angry exhaustion, so I stuck my arm out over his head – as if that'd protect him – and tried not thinking about the scars on his back. I did anyway, and felt like puking.

'We can pay!' I said, instead, and the words came out breathy and quick and I couldn't help but think I sounded an awful lot like Felix, least as much as I ever could, what with his flash vowels that couldn't ever learn to imitate in a Great Septad and a septad and six. But I couldn't think about it too long, since I was also thinking of having to walk back the way we came, still starving, and how many days was it going to add to the journey? How many days could you walk before just keeling over and dying from hunger?

'How much you got?'

'Septagorgon.' And it goes to show how much I'd lost my edge, because I knew a septa was real good money for farmers out here, and they would've been happy with a quarter that.

Not that they were.

The second man sneered again, curling his lip right up to show off his missing teeth. 'We don't want your foreign money,' the first man said, and circled his horse around our backs. Felix didn't move. I turned my head to try keep them both in sight, but Kethe, I knew we were shit out of luck with this one. There wasn't nothing we could do but play along and pray this wouldn't be the one that did it for us. My heart was thumping hard like it wanted to thump right up my throat and out my mouth. And I didn't know what to say, because gorgons weren't foreign money, or they shouldn't be, and I had no clue what the stupid fuck was on about.

'I can work,' I said, not that I could, what with the starvation and all, but I figured I had to try at least.

'Don't need work.'

We stood and stared at each other. 'How,' I said, eventually, 'how far to walk around your land?'

The second man, the miserable bastard, pretended to think a few seconds. 'Week,' he said. 'Maybe two if you're slow.'

Powers and saints, I felt like sitting down next to Felix and refusing to move. Probably end up getting beaten to death, but honestly, that sounded better than walking a week, eating grass and mud, then curling up and dying in the ass-end of Kekropia. 'You want to sell us some food?' I said. 'Know someone who will?'

Maybe, my brain though, as the man said: 'Nah,' maybe I could kill the men and eat their horses. Yeah, or maybe I could get both us beaten to death and least that'd be quicker than starvation. Then I thought of Felix screaming under the whip – and all of a sudden my mind went cold and hard, so quick I was almost breathless with it.

'We're not going back,' I said. 'Just take the money and let us the fuck through.'

The men just laughed. They could see we were harmless, that we weren't going to cause them no trouble – they just didn't care. They were that sort of shit smeared on the hairy ass of humanity. Fuck, I hated them.

Then the first one, the leathery one, said, 'Maybe we do got work for you.' And the way he said it, and that nasty creep-look in his eyes, told me exactly what he meant by work.

'Fine,' I snapped, because like I said – cold and hard. And it wasn't like I was no stranger to sleeping around if I had to, anyway. It'd never been my first choice, not least because it had pissed Keeper off something royal, but then life was hardly ever nice enough to give people like me their first choices. 'You want me to ride your dick out here, or back home front of your wife and kids?'

The man snorted, like I'd made a joke. 'Not you,' he said, and pointed his whip at Felix.

It took a second to even realise what he meant. Then I felt my whole body turn hot, then cold, then hot again, like a whole bout of Winter Fever in five seconds flat. 'Sure,' I heard myself say, like my mouth wasn't even mine no more, spitting the words out like gravel. 'Okay. Him for a decad's worth of food and you let us go wherever the fuck we want. And I want him back tomorrow and able to walk.'

'Two days of food,' the man said. Felix hadn't moved. I wasn't even sure he'd realised what was happening. Wasn't entirely sure I realised what was happening, not really.

'Septad days.'

'Half decad.'

'Fine,' I said, snarling. 'Hope you don't mind screaming.'

Turned out, there weren't half as much screaming as I'd thought there'd be.


End file.
